WEARS1 is owned by the Westmoreland Emergency Amateur Radio Service and maintained by RjDipcord. It is installed on a tower nestled in a small neighborhood in Greensburg. The tower also hosts a prominent 2 meter amateur radio repeater with callsign W3LWW. It operates on 147.180 Mhz.
This was the first prominent node installed by RjDipcord and was used as a testing platform to discover the best ways to build a complete standalone node. It started as a Heltec V3. Quickly it was learned that the Heltec V3 simply is not cut out to be a standalone node running on battery power and solar. It simply uses too much energy to keep the batteries reliably charged up and doesn’t feature dedicated solar charging circuitry. RjDipcord found himself frequently climbing the tower to remedy – changing out panels, swapping batteries, updating firmware. Eventually, he got wise and switched it to a Rak 4631, hardware much better suited for standalone installation. After the swap, WEARS1 was open for business and providing great coverage to most of Greensburg’s eastern side and Latrobe.